Victorian Vocalists: the bolshie basso from Alsace

 

DECK, [?Joseph] Richard (b Guebwiller, Alsace, 27 September 1821; d London, 1882)

 

The career of the bass singer, Richard Deck, is somewhat murked in mystery. In fact, very little would be remembered about him at all, were it not for the fact that he, apparently, at some stage during whatever years he spent in England, had an encounter with the writer George Bernard Shaw, which has resulted in his being mentioned in all those books written, down the years, about Mr Shaw. 

In those biographies we are told that he was ‘an Alsatian basso profundo opera singer’ with extremist (anarchist, communard, Proudhonist) political views, that he was ‘a brother of the famous French ceramist’, Joseph-Théodore Deck (1823-1891), that Shaw spent, at one time, ‘three nights a week visiting his house … to learn French and help Deck improve his English. .’ at which time, the singer was ‘a poverty-stricken old man … with a room in Kentish Town’. Not that old! He died at 60. Shame that they don’t specify when this happened. 

 

My own first sighting of Richard Deck, as a vocalist, occurs 14 March 1846, at the concert given by one Mlle Péan de la Rochejagu, at the Paris Hôtel de Ville, singing her operetta Lully with Mesdames Sabatier and Cico. The next, in February 1848, when, with his ‘belle voix de basse’, he turns up at a concert given by MM Savart, Ropicquet and Mlle Girod, chez Mons Fite, in Paris, alongside a Mlle Boutet ‘pupil of Rubini’.

 

I spot him next, in January 1851, as ‘première basse et des Hermann-Léon’ at the theatre of Montauban, in a season opening with Lucie de Lammermoor: ‘M. Deck, première basse, dont le timbre de voix est parfaitement approprié à la nature des rôles dits de Hermann-Léon, chante avec facilité, et prend une bonne part au succès des pièces. Dans la Dame blanche, il a toujours été convenable, et, certes, le rôle qu'il remplissait n'est pas écrit pour faire briller l'artiste’.

‘Le rôle un peu difficile du capitaine Rolland (Mousquetaires de la reine) a été mal joué, mais bien chanté par M. Deck. Ce jeune artiste manque d'expérience, d'habitude, mais sa voix est fort belle. C'est un bloc de marbre d'où peut jaillir un chef-d'oeuvre; il n'y a qu'à le travailler, le ciseler et le polir’.

In Le Barbier de Séville ‘L'air de la Calomnie, a également valu des bravos à M. Deck’. 

The company also included a young and pretty Madame Deck who seems to have been more skilled on the piano than as the Queen in La Part du diable and Isabelle de Bavière in Charles VI.

 

Then, in 1857, he turns up in London, vaguely mentioned as being ‘primo basso profundo from the Grand Opera at Dresden’. The occasion is Jullien’s Benefit at the Royal Surrey Gardens (29-30 June), for which Deck was engaged as a deputy for an ailing Karl Formes. He sang ‘In diesem heil’gen Hallen’ and joined in a selection from Don Giovanni with the Gassiers, which earned him praise for ‘a first-rate organ and knew how to use it’.

 

In the 1857-8 season, Richard Deck was seen regularly on the concert platforms of London, usually with his Zauberflöte aria. I spot him at the Réunion des arts, singing Carafa’s ‘Le Valet de chambre’ with Mme Borchardt ('Made a great impression  by the quality of his powerful bass voice, and the energy of his style'); at Jullien’s concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre giving ‘La ci darem’ with Jetty Treffz; at the Crystal Palace with Mme Borchardt, and with Mlle Finoli, giving Mazel’s ‘L’orage à la grande chartreuse’; at St Martin’s Hall, with Spohr’s Faust aria ‘Stille noch dies Wuthverlangen’ and the inevitable Sarastro aria, or, billed as ‘the celebrated German basso’ at the Alhambra Monstre Concerts. On 27 March 1858 he was on the bill at the opening concerts of the St James’s Hall.

In May and June of 1858, he appeared in a whole run of public and private concerts, the last of which on 16 July at the Crystal Palace, alongside Sims Reeves, Louisa Pyne, the Weisses and Charlotte Dolby, and giving his ‘Isis und Osiris’ ... in Italian.

 

Richard Deck had evidently been well enough appreciated during his year or so on English platforms, but the 1858 season done, he simply vanishes. No little British paragraphs saying ‘Herr Deck who is so well-known here ... is now doing such-and-such’. Nothing. Where is he?

 

And thus it stays for a whole decade. Until, in April 1869, he resurfaces in London, at the New Philharmonic Society, with his same old Zauberflöte aria, and launches into a second period, of little more than a year, on the British concert platform. The engagements were, this time, a little less classy and a little less frequent, and after just a fair season Deck went out on the road, apparently as a replacement for Perunini (the Bath press suggested that ‘Perunini’ was Deck under another name), singing the bass music in a little concert party put together by Louisa Bodda Pyne and her husband. He gave his Zauberflöte and ‘Miei rampolli’ and joined in the company’s ensemble music, for something like six months around some medium and small provincial dates. And here, for the first time in ages, I see Madame Deck (the same one?) accompanying her husband, in a masonic concert.

 

Back in town for the 1870 season, he turns up just occasionally on bills of mostly second-rate concerts, ‘Herr Ricardo Deck’ accompanied by ‘Mme Deck’ (4 May), and the last appearances which I have spotted are on 10 July 1870, at Madame Montserrat’s concert, singing a French operatic trio, and in 16 July 1870, at a charity affair, in which he performed an aria from Le Châlet and the Carafa duet.

My last sighting of him is in an advertisement, in October of the same year, seeking engagements from a boarding house at 45 Tavistock Square. Well, no. My last sighting is in the death records of the British nation, which include a Richard Deck who died in St Pancras in 1882, at the age of 59. I imagine it is he. Or is it?

 

Because, peculiarly enough, Richard Deck does not seem to appear in any other official document that I can find, and notably in the censi. Maybe his ‘anarchist’ politics included such civil disobediences as skipping censi.

 

But, after the Franco-Prussian war, Richard Deck of London filled in a form declaring his date and place of birth as an Alsatian 'optant' -- choosing French nationality -- so we have at least one solid fact (on his say so) to go on. Son of François-Pierre Deck (1789-1846) and Rose née Ferne (1791-1852)? Of course, it means his age on his death certificate is wrong, but that's nothing unusual ... 

 

So, there it is. A very incomplete record of the life and career of a very curious basso. Maybe more will surface some day. Maybe all those ‘empty’ years may be filled. And maybe not. But for the meanwhile, here you are, ye next hundred Dickens dissectors! The truth about the old man in the garret, for your footnotes! Gimme a credit!

 

PS In an Alsatian journal of 1933 I find .. "Richard Deck, brother of Théodore Deck ... was Königlicher Hofsánger in Dresden .. went to England and sang with his wife, a good pianist, in many concerts". Many? When? Where?

 

Victorian Vocalists: A brace of British bassos ..

 

One British bass of the period leads to another ...  Morley, Weiss, Gregg, Brough ... and nearly every one of these was exported over the oceans ..

This one wasn't. And he may have been one of the best of them all.

HINCHCLIFFE, Thomas (b Stainland-within-Lindley, Yorks 21 March 1820; d Dombey Street, Halifax 12 May 1880).

 

William Hinchcliffe of Stainland was a tailor. He wed one Mary Taylor on 26 December 1819, and, thereafter, they produced at least ten children to fill their home in Priestley Alley. Father William is said to have been musical and, in good Yorkshire fashion, his sons followed in his musical ways. One of them, the eldest, Tom, would even make a profession of it.

 

Tom began his life following in his father’s footsteps as an apprentice tailor – the other boys worked as woolcombers etc – but, in 1848, he got a job as a bass singer at the Leeds Parish Church (25 guineas per annum), and he and his wife, Emily or Emelia née Holroyd, and their two young daughters moved to Leeds.

I first spot Tom in 1850, featured as bass soloist with the Leeds Choral Society, singing with Miss Mountain, Amelia Atkinson, and a Mr Turton, in their performance of The Mount of Olives and performing Spohr’s ‘The Hunter’. By June 1851,  the local press could report ‘he has now become a great favourite’, and he continued on to perform as a vocalist (and occasionally a clarinettist), outside his church duties, in Leeds, Barnsley ('we have not had so fine a bass singer for some time') Huddersfield, Sheffield, Bradford, Lancaster, Preston, Ossett, Dewsbury, Settle, Bramley, Bingley and other local towns, both in concert and in works such as The Messiah, Elijah (14 April 1852), The Creation or Acis and Galatea alongside Mrs Sunderland, Mary Whitham, Emma Thomas, George Inkersall and other Yorkshire stars.

He resigned his post at the Parish Church in May 1852, in 1854 his two daughters died, and, soon after, Hinchcliffe left Leeds to return to his native Halifax area, taking up positions at the local Parish Church, the Beverley Minster, with the West Yorkshire Militia Band and the Stainland Brass Band, while pursuing, as ever, his 'day job' as a pub landlord. In the 1861 census he can be seen presiding at the Halifax Woolshops Talbot Inn, and in 1871 at the Mason’s Arms, Gauxholme.

I see him last on the platform in 1872. In 1878 'one of the best bass vocalists that Yorkshire has produced' suffered a stroke and he died two years later.

 

His little obituary notes say that he sang in London, and before Queen Victoria. I haven’t found a reference to this occasion, but if it were so, I imagine that it was on one of the occasions when the Yorkshire choirs visited London. After all, who would look after the pub...?

 

 *******

Here's another, from the other end of England .. ...

LANSMERE, Richard [HUGGETT, Richard] (b Strood, Kent x 9 July 1837; d 745 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn 3 January 1919)

 

Richard Huggett was born near Rochester, the second son of a painter and decorator of the same name and his wife Susannah, and he trained as a musician. Pianist, organist and conductor. He can be seen in the 1861 census, living in Great Berkhampstead, and listed as ‘professor of music’.

 

However, Mr Huggett also sported a fine bass-baritone singing voice, and in the early 1860s he decided on a change of direction. And a change of name. Mr Huggett took upon himself the surname of ‘Lansmere’.

 

Mr Lansmere was seen, from 1862, often in first-class company, at Collard’s Rooms, the Beaumont Institution ('Il Balen', 'Sulla poppa'), for Mr Filby at the Victoria Hall ('Farewell, if ever fondest prayer'), at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in Howard Glover’s concerts ('Farewell, I did not know your worth'), at the Hanover Square Rooms ('The Norse King's Wooing'), St James's Hall ('Chrystabel') with the Vocal Association, at the concerts of Aptommas, Miss Chipperfield, Clinton Fynes (‘Autumn Song’), Frederick Archer, Harriet Tennant et al, as well as in the suburbs and near counties, including, of course, often the Chatham and Rochester area ('Arm, arm ye brave, 'With Pious Hearts', 'Rejoice O Judah', 'If doughty deeds'' 'A pearl I boast is mine'). In 1868 he travelled to Dublin as part of a Brousil Family concert party tour with Mr and Mrs Frederic Archer and Wallace Wells (‘Eri tu’, Angelina’s ‘Sir Marmaduke’).

 

In early 1870, as the baritone of Stanley Betjemann’s little touring opera company, he took part in the operatic performances briefly mounted at St George’s Hall. His Valentine in Faust won fine reviews, and it was recorded that he was encored in ‘Even Bravest Heart’. When he played in Maritana with Betjemann at the same venue the press commented ‘He has only recently taken to the stage … He sings with care and always with appropriate rendering. In all probability he has a future before him.’

I spot him in concert in Dublin, in a concert Sonnambula with Pauline Rita and Perren (‘full-toned bass voice’) and then back in small-time touring opera, managing a virtual co-operative troupe with conductor Isidore de Solla and tenor Francis Gaynar (Maritana, La Sonnambula, Il Trovatore, Faust, Martha, Fra Diavolo).

 

About this time he settled in the Birmingham area, and during the 1870s he can be seen in concerts there (‘The Vagabond’, ‘Ruddier than the cherry’, ‘The King’s Highway', ‘Sulla poppa’, ‘Sir Marmaduke’, ‘Jack’s Yarn, ‘The Village Blacksmith’), but in 1881 he was back on the operatic road with William Parkinson, and with the Walshams, in a company carrying much the same repertoire as before.

 

In 1883, he appeared at the Crystal Palace as Mephistopheles in Faust, in Maritana, in Benedict’s Graziella for Temple and Faulkener Leigh, before joining up with the Offord family operetta troupe. His connection with the Offord-Cole-Gilbert families would endure: In 1887 he created the role of Luis Pasha in Parry Cole’s operetta The Romance of the Harem at Kilburn, and the following month, Albert Gilbert’s cantata Abdallah at St George’s Hall.

 He continued to tour in small opera companies, and won paragraphs in the papers when, as Devilshoof in The Bohemian Girl, he fell from a bridge bearing the baby. Several years later, he was still introducing the ‘accident’ into his performance, now with Valentine Smith’s opera, and at London’s Olympic Theatre, and still fooling press and public.

 In 1890 (6 May), Lansmere left England, and emigrated to America. The shipping lists for the Lydian Monarch show Mr Lansmere, aged 50 ,accompanied by a 29 (?!) -year-old Mrs Lansmere, with a Louis aged 15 and a Maud aged 11. Something doesn’t add up familywise (he was single in the 1881 census) but I daresay there is an explanation. Of course there is an explanation. Mr Huggett had finally married. 

And he had married (March 1889) a curious lady. The ‘widowed’ Marie Elizabeth Hasslacher. Marie said on her wedding banns that she was 39 years old, and the daughter of Colonel Frederick Foster Burlock. So the children were undoubtedly little Hasslachers. But Colonel F F Burlock was a Yale man, so his facts are well recorded, and he was born in 1837. And said to be childless. How then was he Marie’s father? And if her age is wrongly recorded, how would she have a 15 year-old son? Curious?

 

But she did indeed have such a son. Because when 'Mary Haslacher' sued Louis C Hasslacher for alimony, in 1877, the court report noted ‘a 14 month-old child’ on her lap in the box! The evidence during this suit, on her life and history, was colourful, to say the least. And she didn’t get her alimony. She was said to be 29 (she had admitted to 34 on her ship's manifest, shortly before) and her children were said to be born 20 June 1874 ('Louis von Hasslacher') and 2 August 1876, but Hasslacher, though admitting fatherhood of at least one child, denied marriage. She said all sorts of things. And gave all sorts of names. Of which Burlock was not one. He was, it appears, but a previous lover, and allegedly the father of a first (dead?) child. Amazingly, she won her ‘married or not married’ suit.

 

Anyway, Mary/Marie was also a performer, under the name of ‘Marie Gurney’. Which may or may not have been her actual name. And variants. A large performer, as she weighed in at some 200lbs. She had, so it was said, gone to Italy in 1867 to study, allegedly at some time married the Rev Dale of London, afterwards sang in the chorus with Strakosh, played Little Buttercup in several small American Pinafore companies, and acted in melodrama. She seemed to have a connection with Britain however (where F F latterly lived and died) and she is obviously the ‘Miss Gurney’ travelling to Britain on The City of London which was also taken by the Lydia Thompson troupe and by a Mr Hasslacher in 1873. Which is when Marie said, improbably, that she got married. A ‘May Gurney’ is seen on the British provincial stage (Hans the Boatman) in the 1880s. In 1878 'Marie Gurney' can be seen in minor operetta in America, with soprano Charles Heywood, claiming to be 'of Her Majesty's Theatre, London', in 1879 in HMS Pinafore at the Standard Theatre (as 'Kate Gurney' ?) with the downmarket Laurent/Corelli team, Clorinda to the Cinderella of Eva Mills in Brooklyn (1880) ... 

 

The Lansmeres and children arrived in America and set up as singing teachers with ‘St George’s School’ in Brooklyn, Marie claiming to be ‘of the symphonic conservatoire, Milan’ and to have sung with Nilsson. Apparently they made a droll couple, the tubby ‘Madame Marie Ernst (sic) Lansmere’ and her husband ‘Professor Lansmere’ with his long hair, moustachios and imperial.

 

Marie’s ambitions, however, went further. She wanted to start her own comic opera company. And she did. The Marie Gurney Opera Company, with Richard Lansmere, late of the Olympic Theatre, London, playing Buttercup and Corcoran in Pinafore (Elaine Gryce being Josephine!), La Mascotte, a rewritten The Bohemian Girl as The Gypsy Queen (played by Marie), a potted Les Cloches de Corneville and The Mikado were played in venues in Brooklyn, New Jersey and in variety houses for a couple of seasons. The 'assistant business manager' and an occasional performer was Mr Louis Gurney. Lansmere was conductor.

Alas, Mrs Lansmere-Hasslacher-Hoggett (sic) ended up in the Supreme Court of New York, charged with not paying her bills and loans. Which definitively knolled the knell of the company. Their costumes and scenery were auctioned off. The school seems already to have vanished. Richard, however, had steady work as a church singer at various Roman Catholic churches and, as late as 1901, I see him at singing regularly St Charles Borromeo’s Church, alongside British tenor Francis Gaynar. Marie gave occasional entertainments.

My last sighting of the pair – Richard and Mary (sic) -- is in the 1910 census, still in Brooklyn’s East 35th Street, with 32 year-old Maud G Haslocher (sic), born England of a German father and a Connecticut mother. The child both its parents had abandoned at the age of seven. Mary has a Connecticut father and an English mother. She admits to having borne five children, two of whom are living, he to being a teacher... 

 

Well, there are obviously ins and outs to this family that we needn’t follow. Maud is alone in Lynbrook, NY, by 1920, a stenographer for a typist company. Richard Lansmere had died -- of heart disease and senility -- in Brooklyn. on 3 January 1919 'retired musician, aged 81, widower'. Maud had signed his death certificate: 'daughter'. Marie had died 1 August 1913 at Mineola NY. Allegedly 62. 

 

The music press didn't notice the passing of one who had led such a persistently small-time, but thoroughly full, life as Victorian vocalist.

PS One knows not to trust Wikipedia, but far worse is this AI thing that Google is attempting to promote. Quoting me - me! - they aver that Lansmere was hired to play Ralph in Pinafore. Goodness! A bass Rackstraw. Why do they do this?

Mrs Alban Croft

 

Many is the time I have searched history to match a photograph or portrait of a singer with his or her story. this time it's the other way round. I have the story ... but no picture.  Revelling in my success in disrobing the tale of Mrs Elwood Andrea, I lingered a little in the letter 'A' and turned my attentions to Alban Croft or, more especially, his rather more talented wife ....

CROFT, Mrs Alban [CROFT, Elinor] (née GRIFFITHS) (b Church Street, Widcombe 26 December 1813; d Dublin, 22 January 1878)

 

Alban Joseph Croft (b Llanarth, Monmouth 22 June 1803; d 53 Leinster Road, Dublin 5 December 1891) ‘son of James Croft of the Park, Llantilio Crossenny, afterwards of Troy, by Anne daughter to Charles Hyde of Hyde End, co Berks’, a family which was worthy of inclusion in a contemporary History of Monmouthshire, was a ‘professor of music’ in London in the 1830s. My earliest sighting of him as a performer, 'a pupil of Garcia', in January 1829, is singing in a concert at Bath. However, when he appeared at Mme Dulcken's concert in 1834 (7 June, 'E serbata') at London's King's Concert Rooms, it was billed as 'his first public appearance'.

 

On 28 July 1831, Croft was wedded, at All Souls, Marylebone, to Miss Elinor Griffiths, a teenaged lady, also 'of Bath', whose 'natural and lawful father' was a 'hatter, hosier and glover' called Walter, and whose mother, Jane Seymour Griffiths (apparently a stay and corset-maker) witnessed the ceremony. Miss Griffiths – to be known for the next forty years and more as ‘Mrs Alban Croft’ -- was possessed of a strong soprano voice, and from 1837 she was put in evidence on several occasions in important positions in the London operatic stage.

 In 1837 and 1838, the Alban Crofts – baritone and soprano – turn up togetherr in a number of London concerts. The first of these I have noticed is Mr Kellner’s (April 1837) where they performed Donizetti’s Torquato Tasso duet ‘Colei Sofronia Olinda egli si appella’ together and The Times commented: ‘the lady and gentleman have both very powerful voices and are possessed of good taste’. They gave concerts of their own in both years, appeared at the Hanover Square Rooms, and in 1838 I see Mrs Croft taking part in a concert at the Surrey Theatre alongside several Italian opera vocalists. And it was paragraphed in the press that the couple were to star in a new English opera, by Rooke.

 

On 9 March 1839, however, Elinor found herself thoroughly among the Italians, for the young singer was hired by Laporte for the Italian opera, and launched (‘Madame Croft her first appearance on the stage’) at the opening of his season as Antonina in Belisario. The occasion was evidently something of a disaster. This time, The Times found nothing to like: ‘an Englishwoman we presume from he pronunciation of the National anthem’ ‘without the slightest pretensions to the position, her voice is weak, her intonation most defective, and her acting inanimate...’. ‘Could not sing in tune’ dismissed another critic.

 

The Crofts returned to the concert world, but, before the year was out, Mrs Croft was given a second theatrical chance, this time in English opera at Drury Lane. She appeared as the Fairy Queen to the Cinderella of Miss Delcy (‘Mrs Alban Croft came out well as the Fairy Queen, her voice is powerful but the part is too small to allow of a decided opinion 'a fine quality of voice and indications of good natural taste'). A few days later, however, she was put up as Polly Peachum, alongside Mr Frazer and Mrs Waylett, and the same paper which had damned her so roundly at Her Majesty’s Theatre wrote: ‘Her voice is of singular power, completely filling the house, and in the higher passages, which so much predominate in the part of Polly, she displays a compass even equal to her power. Nature already having given her so much power, there is no occasion for her to force her voice, which she sometimes does, and thus produces a sound deficient in sweetness. For ornament she has too great predilection ... she buries the native melody beneath a load of adornments. This was last night the more disappointing, as she invariably began her songs exceedingly well, proceeding tastefully and evenly until she at once dissipated the charm by a heterogenous flourish or a note artificially sustained ... we recommend her to prefer simplicity in the singing of an old English melody to a perpetual display. With her fine voice, pleasing person, and her agreeable notion of acting, it is completely in her power to take a good position on the stage, and if she des not attain this, it will be her own fault…’

 

She followed up as Rosetta in Love in a Village (‘graceful singing of the airs and the fine expression of a countenance which lights up with musical intelligence and beauty’ ‘a very pleasing representative of the supposed village maid’) with Frazer, Leffler, Mrs Waylett and Miss Betts, as Lucy Bertram in Guy Mannering, Diana Vernon in Rob Roy ('with considerable taste and effect'), Lisette in an English version of Boieldieu's Le Nouveau Seigneur du Village (My Lord is not my Lord) with Henry Phillips, and as Aeolia in The Mountain Sylph (‘The quality of Mrs Albin Croft’s voice is really excellent, combining the richest tones with great pathos and purity of expression ..’), before Mr Hammond, the manager, went broke, owing her £36.13.4d

 

Mrs Croft repeated her Mountain Sylph (with her husband as Hela) and The Beggar's Opera at the Surrey Theatre, and they played extensively in the British provinces (Der Freischütz, My Lord is not my Lord, Guy Mannering, La Sonnambula, Fra Diavolo, No!, Rob Roy, Rosina, No Song no Supper etc) most often in a threesome with tenor Shrivall, ending up in Dublin where Frazer was tenor and where Cinderella was produced. This time Elinor took the title-role. They also played The Mountain Sylph, Amilie, La Sonnambula, Fra Diavolo, The Slave, Lucia di Lammermoor &c as they continued around Britain. Oddly, the London census of 1841 shows Elinor and Alban in John Street, Charing Cross, with theri three children, (and there were more to follow ) but it was not until the beginning of 1843 that she surfaced for a third time on the London stage, this time at the Princess’s Theatre, where she was apparently engaged to cover prima donna Eugenia Garcia as La Sonnambula. 

During the season, she was cast in the leading role in Mrs Gilbert a’Beckett’s opera Little Red Riding Hood, and the metropolitan press delivered a third verdict: ‘Having improved vastly since she was last before a London public she is now a very pleasing and interesting vocalist with the advantage of considerable personal attractions. There is no great feeling in her singing, there is nothing that approaches an inspiration, but her style is good, her execution neat and in the distribution of light and shade she evinces a calculated taste and judgement. The command over her voice, which is perfect in most instances, fails her occasionally in the high notes...the finale, which is a piece to display the execution of the prima donna, like so many in the modern Italian operas, she achieved with great credit.’

However, this was her last London stage appearance. In the mid-1840s, Alban Croft took up a church engagement in Dublin, and thereafter he, his wife, and their family of musical children were seen only rarely in performance in England. Mrs Croft performed occasionally in opera – I have noticed her in Scotland and Liverpool (1845 La Sonnambula) with Sims Reeves, and playing in Lucia di Lammermoor in Ireland – but reserved her appearances, thereafter, largely to concerts and to church singing, mostly in Dublin, through until the 1860s.

 

Alban Croft held engagements at the University Church and at St Xavier’s Chapel, where his eldest son, Hamilton Croft (b 1834; d Dublin 4 August 1887), subsequently succeeded him. 

Daughters Marie (Mary), Celia and in particular Kate, also appeared as singers.

 

Croft also penned an amount of published music, of which a ‘My beautiful, my own’ (1842) -- sung by Mr and Mrs Croft and by Sims Reeves -- seems to have been the most performed. The words, by one Irish J Halford, were judged good, Croft's music 'indifferent', but Reeves gave it at the prestigious London Wednesday concerts, and plugged it solidly.

Geraldine St Maur: or The Blogger bloggered ...

 

Blogger tells me I have posted 1639 articles. And have had over a million viewers. Maybe, but Blogger's statistics have always been rather iffy.

However, every single one of those articles -- whether diary, travelogue, theatre review or good old plain research has one thing in common: they are each and every one 'all my own work'.

Number 1640 is, therefore to be marked with a white stone.

I don't know how and why I got into delving into the Who Was Who of C19th members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Anyway, I did. And for a goodly while there, I daily divested the once well-known and less well-known Cartesians of their stage name, and opened up their real lives a little. Some, of course, were less than obliging: a few positively infuriating, and these were confined to a dungeon known after its most opaque occupants as the 'Too Hard Box, or the Millie Vere-Geraldine St Maur Box'.

But I do not give up easily. The years went by, and like Pandora's box, this box -- one-by-one -- let various of its prisoners escape. On 13 July 2021 I nabbed 'Millie Vere'

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2021/07/lord-love-you-millie-vere-or-out-of.html

So the 'Too Hard Box' had to be re-named. It became the Geraldine StMaur Box. Until today.

Now, there are a number of learned folk who profess to be with me in this (useless?) search for the truth about these -- and all sorts of other -- old-time singers. But easily the most diligent is Jeff Clarke of Engalnd's Opera della Luna. So when Jeff writes with a query, I know it's not just idle chatter of an inconsequential matter ...

So here, I let him take up the story. No 1640 is all yours, Jeff!

"It all started with Rose Berend. 

Who?   One of the original cast of Thespis at the Gaiety. For some time I have been pursuing some research into Hollingshead’s Gaiety, a very different place than George Edwardes later more celebrated establishment.  In looking into the original cast of Thespis I saw that little or nothing was known of Rose Berend who played Pretteia.  For anyone who’s interested, she was born Sarah Rose Brunt (soon to become Brent) in 1847. She worked a number of years as Rose de Brent before becoming Berend.  She died in 1930, her death recorded under her married name: Rose Williams. Aged 83.

Rose Berend

With some pride at my digging success, I forwarded my discoveries to the master himself (KG) who replied “Wow!  Well done. Another one bites the dust! Now have a go at Geraldine St Maur”.  

What a dastardly thing to do to an unsuspecting amateur sleuth like yours truly.   Geraldine St Maur was a much travelled member of D’Oyly Carte’s company and the first Peep-Bo in New York. She therefore figures in many advertisements and illustrations, yet nothing hitherto was known of who she was.  I didn’t hold out much hope.

'Geraldine St Maur'

The first thing to discover was that there was a genuine aristocratic lady of that name: the daughter of the Duke of Somerset who made the papers in 1864. There were many references to her in 1864, but only in that year, from then on she was referred to as Lady Geraldine Somerset. But the name must have made an impression on someone wanting a classier identity.

I discovered that the name St Maur is a corruption of Seymour (or is it the other way round?) and that the Somerset St Maurs are descendants and relatives of the ill-fated third wife of Henry VIII.   

I therefore began searches into Seymours who might fit the bill.  None, alas, appeared.  In a last ditch attempt to find the elusive Geraldine I abandoned the Sey and searched just on Moore.  There was a very successful actress Louisa Moore working in the late 1860s and 1870s who turned up in searches frequently, making looking for another lady of the stage with that surname even more tricky. And I almost missed her.  There she was, lurking “disguised” in the 1871 census:  

Yes, Find My Past says she was a medical student, but look more closely at the actual form…  She is a 16 year old musical student living in lodgings with her mother Sarah Ann Moore who made hats for a living. 

10 years earlier she appears on the census as plain Louisa Moore – with her mother Sarah and father James, in a house which they shared with two other families, one a musician.   

 Once again the AI of Find My Past has misread the handwritten form. Louisa was 6 not 4, and born in 1855.  Did their housemate George, a professional musician, have an early influence on the young Louisa? And did she assume a fantasy identity as the aristocratic Lady St Maur?

By 1871 the young musical student had acquired some additional names: Geraldine Louisa Rose Moore. 

I did wonder briefly whether this made her too old as a likely candidate, but not at all. She was two years younger than Leonora Braham and Jessie Bond who were both born in 1853. 

Although the renown of the successful actress, Louisa Moore, would deter our young singer from working under the same name, I believe an advertisement for a charity concert -- in support of the Tichborne Claimant -- at the very minor little King's Cross Theatre in 1872 shows our young Louisa making her debut as an alumna of the Royal Academy of Music, sharing the bill with Mr Lorenzo and his Performing Dogs.  

The question then arises, what was she doing in between this concert and the first appearance of Geraldine St Maur for D’Oyly Carte? 

There was a rather enigmatic young actress called simply Miss Geraldine who appears from time to time throughout the 1870s playing small roles in touring shows. This may or may not be her.

I think the most likely explanation is that she was working as a chorister, if not for D’Oyly Carte, then for Carl Rosa or one of the many other companies that were on the road, whose choristers, as with D’Oyly Carte, were not acknowledged in programmes and certainly not in the press.

We know that she first appears in records as Geraldine St Maur in 1883 when she played a named role in Matrimony, the curtain raiser to Patience on tour, and presumably was one of twenty love-sick maidens in the main opera.  Might she not have been in the chorus for Pinafore and Pirates and worked for Carte for a few years by then, but not had cause so far to be identified by name?  She seems to have played in the 1883 Plymouth pantomime, and ('of Mr D'Oyly Carte's company') as the singing Fairy Queen in The Forty Thieves at Bristol at Christmas 1884 ...

Her D’Oyly Carte career from this point on is well documented elsewhere. After her final appearance with the company, I can find her in just two roles.  

Firstly in August 1912 she joined the cast of a show called A Girl’s Temptation, by the moralising reformer Mrs Morton Powell, which had been on the road since 1910.  It apparently taught its audience “a great moral lesson”, and was largely played in towns where such a lesson was badly needed.  And then finally I find her in 1913 working with Rutland Barrington in Ways and Means. 

Barrington was 60 and still working was largely trading on his Savoy reputation but attempting to further his career as a comic actor. Sadly the theatres that were prepared to take his show were not the most glamorous. Yes, they played Manchester, but at the Royal Osborne Theatre – a grim old playhouse in a rough suburb of the city. Crewe, Burton-on –Trent, and Dewsbury were other dates on the tour. It was certainly not Number 1!

Miss St Maur appears not to have been in the show when it opened in Oxford in January 1913, (maybe still touring with A Girl’s Temptation), but she appears in the cast list the following week in Hastings.

The play did not do well.  This tour folded in April. Barrington returned to the West End to appear in other plays. Ways and Means appears to have been extensively re-written and presented later that year in the West End as The Gilded Pill.  It fared no better. Ms St Maur was not in it.

If Geraldine St Maur was indeed Louisa Moore of Lambeth, then she was nearly 60 by this time.   

And if she was, and never married, then she may have died in Lambeth, aged 63 in the last quarter of 1919.

So that’s my theory. I’m not sure how watertight it is, but that is it.  At least Kurt is convinced, and that’s good enough for me.

And it's good enough for me!  Now I have to find a new name for the "Too Hard Box" of the D'Oyly Carte archives!

'Mrs Elwood Andrea': a Corkonian contralto in two halves

 

It is over two decades since I began nosing around in the world of Victorian vocalists. 

Sometimes I worked beaverishly on the long list of known, less-known, hardly-known vocalists that I'd exhumed. Other times, when working on another book or, after Ian's death, as I floated round the world in search of .. what? The project was shelved for a while or two.

Nowadays, I'm more inclined to go to my Dropbox and supply, when wished, an unused article from earlier years for a magazine or my blog ...

But, where there is the thrill of the chase? The winkling out of the true identity of an artist from behind a morass of pseudonyms?

Well, I've come to a wee hiatus. I've passed my 80th anniversary. I have two completed books in the works ... maybe, I thought, today I'll try once more to exhume some of those facts, dates and identities with which I failed ten and twenty years ago. I mean, I got Millie VERE by dint of pure persistence, Jeff even got Geraldine ST MAUR ... maybe ... just one?

I clicked on my index. Peeeugh. The 'As' are not good.  I've already written up 'Haydée Abrek' and failed the find which French Duchess she was. Annie ANYON died at 29. 'Mr ARTHURSON' the wipsy tenor I've followed through his multiple name-changes. 'J O ATKINS' in infuriatingly reticent ... and as for 'Mrs Elwood ANDREA' ... I mean, what?

Hey, guess what folks, I nabbed one! I sha'n't go into the details of how, but when you've been doing this as long and as minutely as I have ... sometime you hit the bull's balls!

Mrs Elwood Andrea was neither Mrs, nor Elwood, nor Andrea  (2) she was not 'of London'.  The lady in question, who surfaced in the 1860s as a deep contralto vocalist, was from Cork, Ireland. And by 1860, she was nearly 40. Her three younger sisters (Anne, Sarah Catherine, Ellen Frances) were married ... she wasn't and never would be.

He real name was Eliza Agnes SULLIVAN and she was a daughter of one Thomas Sullivan who was for many years a well-known liquor-merchant ('whiskey and port') in Bristol's College Green. 

Eliza clearly had a tendency to music from her youth for the 1841 census lists her as 'professor of music'. She appears locally from 1838, with Millar and Mrs Loder, and thereafter, in 1840, I see a Miss Sullivan singing in a Tewkesbury Music Festival and at Cheltenham ('Adieu to dear Cambria'), in 1841 in concert, when her 'Come Ever Smiling Liberty' was adjudged 'deficient in softness and melody'), and regularly with the Bristol Choral Society ('a celebrated vocalist from Cheltenham'), in Newport ... but by 1843 she is advertised as 'of London'...

In September 1859 'Miss Sullivan' can be seen singing the Rossini Stabat Mater with Mme Guerabella... but then things changed. Mrs Sullivan died, and Eliza decided to become Madame Elwood Andrea. 

'Madame Andrea' apears as such in November 1860, at a concert in Westbourne Hall given by J Theodore Petters, 'blind pianist'. Mr Petters was supported by Charlotte Gilbert, and Eliza appeared thereafter with Charlotte and her husband, Alfred Gilbert, in a goodly number of their lecture programmes and concerts at the Arion, the Society of Fine Arts et al ('Il Segreto', 'To Thee', 'The Native Greek Girl', 'Three Fishers', 'Viva la patria terra', The Minstrel Boy') and over the next thirteen years she was heard frequently in suburban concerts, in pretty good company, to pretty good reviews (' a lady of the most accomplished musical talent'). Bath found 'she possesses a magnificent contralto voice of great compass' and when she stepped in to part-cover Louisa Pyne in The Creation with the National Choral Society she was adjudged 'a decided success'. A less likely jump-in came at a Charity concert at the Hanover Square Rooms when she replaced in extremis no less a basso than Willoughby Weiss!

On several occasions she sang the Stabat Mater with the Gilberts, she appeared with the Chelsea Harmonic Society in Samson, in various Messiahs, at Hackney in Judas Maccabeus, and after having sung the supporting contralto music, behind Lucy Franklein, in Elijah, scored another 'West End' credit when she took the second contralto role, to Janet Patey, in a performance of Placida the Christian Martyr at the Albert Hall (November 1872). 

One concert followed another: Miss Sullivan sang, she played piano, she recited ... and then she vanished. 

I am guessing that someone was ill. She was living at this stage with her accountant brother John and his wife in Harley Road, Hampstead. 1 August 1878 Mrs Sullivan died. A little more than a year later, it was Eliza.

Eliza, by any other name had been an ubiquitous performer around the suburbs of London for over thirty years. Not a top-of-the-bill name, not often in major venues, but a solid and agreeable singer. Who it has taken me 20 years of digging to discover was one person, not two ...   Brentwood, Kentish Town, Hackney, Chelsea, Westbourne Grove, Epping, Dorking, Hornchurch .. even Windsor and Woolwich will have missed her.

And I? At least I have sorted out who she was!

And I see Google has decided to insert blue links into my text. Hopefully they won't show.

PS Obviously neither of the two Misses Sullivan was deemed worth a portrait. But one may turn up before my demise.

Willoughby Weiss, British bass

 

More than twenty years ago, when I first began my writings on Victorian Vocalists, one of the earliest subjects to come under my attention was the bass, W H Weiss. However, the article, below, for some reason didn't make the 100 which got into my published collection (Victorian Vocalists, 2017), and has sat in a file since 2005 ...

Until now, when a conversation on bass singers with my friend Betsy, and a sighting of a nice photo on ebay, has prodded me into delayed action ...

WEISS, Willoughby Hunter (b Waterloo, Liverpool 2 April 1820; d St George’s Villa, Gloucester Rd., Regent’s Park, London 24 October 1867)

WEISS, Georgina Ansell (b Gloucester x 16 January 1826; d Chain Pier Cottage, Brighton 6 November 1880)

 

The most outstanding and successful native bass singer of the British operatic and concert stages in the 1850s and 1860s, Willoughby Weiss was born in Liverpool in the year 1820. His father was the well-known flautist Willoughby Gasper Weiss (1872-1853), latterly active also as a composer and a music-seller in Liverpool, and his mother the former Ann Hunter (1798-1853, m St Oswald, Chester 6 December 1814). Of his parents’ six children, Willoughby was the only one who followed his father into a musical career, and he left home in his teens -- heralded by grand Liverpool notices ('rich and truly splendid bass voice .. not inferior to many of our best singers') -- for London, where he took singing lessons from George Smart and then from the composer M William Balfe.

It was Balfe, perhaps under the terms of an indenture, who shepherded the young basso into his earliest London engagements and who gave him his first opportunities. The first of these that I have spotted was in March 1841, shortly before young Willoughby’s twenty-first birthday, at a concert given by the Concentores Society at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Several veritable stars of the music world – Maria Hawes, John Parry and the established bass singer William Machin – were on the bill, but the young man and his ‘splendid bass voice’ won distinct approval for his rendition of Balfe’s ‘Might I march through life again’.

Further engagements followed swiftly, and, just a few weeks later, the young vocalist stepped on to the platform at the Hanover Square Rooms (30 April) to share, with the same William Machin, the basso music in a prestigious performance, for the New Musical Fund, of Haydn’s Creation. His fellow soloists were a rich team: Charlott Ann Birch, the very young Louisa and Susan Pyne, Elizabeth Rainforth, J W Hobbs, William Harrison and Machin. 

 

Although it was quickly evident that, all things being equal, young Mr Weiss would be a vocalist to be reckoned with in years to come, at this stage there were still criticisms of his performance. At Miss Roeckel’s concert, he ‘sang two songs displaying the compass and intonation of his fine bass voice, but his style is that of a barrel organ stop – frigid, heavy and passionless’. He gave that favourite standby of the young basso, ‘Qui sdegno’, at the Choral Fund concert (21 May) and at one of Charles Neate’s soirées, with what was referred to as ‘his phlegmatic coldness’, although ‘in a preferable style to Herr Staudigl at the German opera who barbarously interpolates this sublime song with detestable variations’. At another, he gave Smith’s ‘The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and was dubbed ‘an excellent bass singer’. At twenty-one years of age, to be spoken of in the same breath as the magnificent Staudigl was (even if merely to provide a music critic with a superfluous jab) quite something. He sang in a number of further concerts (Mlle Meerti’s, Gesualdo Lanza’s, Blewitt’s, Frederick Williams, Elise Launitz’s) during the course of the season and, then, in the early part of the new year, he travelled with his teacher to the Continent. In March, the news came through from Paris that ‘Balfe and Osborne had a successful concert last week, all the English being present. A Mr Weiss who made some stand last year in London was well received.’

 

Back in Britain, in May, Weiss visited his home town, in the company of Balfe and his wife and, joined by two other locals in Mrs and Miss St Albin, gave a concert: ‘Mr W Weiss the son of Mr Weiss, the respected music-seller here, gave his inaugural concert on Wednesday last and made his first appearance before his fellow townspeople whom he equally surprised and gratified. [He] possesses a voice and talent that, with continued study, will assuredly place him very high in the profession he has chosen’.

 

From Liverpool they continued on to Dublin, where they were joined by Adelaide Kemble and Miss Rainforth, before returning to London for the season. The young bass found himself warmly welcomed as a concert singer, and on 29 June Balfe promoted a concert, at the home of the Earl of Tankerville, in which his young pupil was featured alongside Miss Kemble, the Ronconis and Rubini. Immediately after, Balfe took his little group – with Misses Kemble and Rainforth as prime donne -- off for a two months tour, starting in Dublin with a series of operas. Thus, it was in Dublin that the ‘pupil of Mr Balfe’ made his first appearance on the operatic stage, singing the role of Oroveso in Norma alongside the two sopranos who had the previous season starred in the same roles at Covent Garden with Adam Leffler as their basso. Norma was followed by La Sonnamubula, Il Nozze di Figaro and Elena Uberti (the Covent Garden 1841-2 repertoire), before the little star team headed on to Glasgow and then back via concerts in such dates as Nottingham (‘he gave ‘The Wanderer’ in very masterly style’), Bath and Cheltenham, to London.

 In London, Weiss appeared at the Hanover Square Rooms Wednesday concerts – where he was proclaimed ‘a rising vocalist who possesses a rich bass voice of great scope’ following his rendition of Calcott’s ‘The Last Man’ -- and in a selection of other concerts, before he was signed to make his London opera debut -- again as the successor of Leffler -- at the Princess's Theatre. The debut took place on Boxing Day 1842, and the opera was La Sonnambula, with Weiss as a 21 year-old Count Rodolfo to the Amina of Eugénie Garcia and the Elvino of John Templeton, and with the ageing Elizabeth Feron as Theresa. ‘Although labouring under the disadvantages of a theatrical novitiate, [he] displayed his superb and manly organ to great advantage’ reported the press. In the months that followed, the young singer was given a thorough operatic baptism as the Princess’s mounted Lucia di Lammermoor (Bide-the-Bent), Little Red Riding Hood (Lord Robert de Bracey), I Puritani (Sir George Walton), Tancredi (Orbazzano) and La Gazza ladra (Podesta) with Garcia, and latterly Albertazzi, as prime donne and Allen succeeding Templeton as tenor. The more experienced François Burdini shared the basso roles with Weiss, and Weiss shared his operatic pursuits with appearances in oratorio and in concert (Philharmonic Society).

 

Whilst Willoughby Weiss was establishing himself as a, or even the, English basso of the future, a young soprano from Gloucester ‘whose father [Henry Barrett, organist and musical instrument seller] was formerly in the [Three Choirs Festival] choir, and possessed a magnificent voice’ – but who was, in 1841, languishing in Gloucester jail presumably for repeated bankruptcy, and who died in February 1843 -- made her first official professional appearance at the Gloucester Festival of 1844, singing ‘a nymph’ to the Galatea of Caradori Allan and the Acis of Manvers. ‘Her appearance excited great interest and, when she had in some measure overcome her extreme diffidence, justified the kindness of her reception. She has fine qualities and promises to become a distinguished vocalist’. ‘Nineteen year-old’ Georgina Barrett, a new and highly promising pupil of the Royal Academy of Music, had already been seen on the amateur stage, notably as Dorabella in a Cosi fan tutte at the Prince’s Theatre (1 February 1841), in which she had been teamed with the future Mrs Alexander Newton as Fiordiligi. At the Academy, she would have as contemporaries such singers of the future as Louisa Bassano, Marian Marshall, Marian Enderssohn, Sophia Messent, Elizabeth Steele, Mary Rose and Sara Flower, but young Miss Barrett would have a career almost as good as the best of them. She would have all but the very earliest part of that career, from 15 September 1845, as Mrs Georgina Weiss.

 

In 1844, Willoughby Weiss returned to the Princess’s, where he repeated his Oroveso to the Norma of Mrs Wood, sang Elmiro in Othello with Allen, Mme Garcia and Burdini, and through May and June took the part of Campo Mayor alongside Anna Thillon in her triumphant production of The Crown Diamonds. Later in the year he created the part of Moncegnino in Balfe’s The Daughter of St Mark. The highlight of Georgina’s year was her London debut as soprano soloist (6 November) with the Sacred Harmonic Society in Israel in Egypt alongside the Misses Cubitt and Dolby, Hobbs, Stretton and Machin.

 

In 1845, amongst a full run of concert engagements, Willoughby Weiss created the role of the Duke d’Aquila, alongside Mme Thillon, Harrison and Borrani in Balfe’s new opera The Enchantress, Georgina appeared at the Ancient Concerts (‘a very promising élève of the Royal Academy of Music’), and in between times the two young people went up to Liverpool and got married. 

 

In 1846, Willoughby Weiss was engaged for the operatic company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and, on 3 February, he created there the title-role in Macfarren’s newest opera Don Quixote alongside Miss Rainforth and George Stretton, making his mark with a drinking song ‘When Bacchus invented the bowl’. A few weeks later he introduced another role, in Benedict’s opera The Crusaders, playing the part of William on a bill with Misses Rainforth and Romer, Harrison, Borrani and Donald King.  Later in the year, whilst Georgina stuck to the concert platform, he was also seen in Fra Diavolo, Cinderella, Stradella and The Maid of Cashmere, before taking on another important new role as the Marquis de Vernon in Balfe’s The Bondman (11 December). He had one of the opera’s most notable arias, ‘There is nothing so perplexing’, and the press acclaimed ‘his delivery of it was the most masterly and thoroughly effective vocal exhibition of the whole evening’.

In the first months of 1847, he added two further notable credits to his quickly swelling list. At a concert given at Drury Lane by Hector Berlioz (7 February) Willoughby Weiss sang the role of Mephistopheles in the concert version of the first two acts of his Faust, and, a fortnight later, he introduced another new role as Mathias in Matilda of Hungary.

Georgina, meanwhile, was making her way successfully in the concert world, often in tandem with her husband, but also alone. When she appeared at the Historical concerts at Exeter Hall, with an air from Comus, she won a recall. However, her operatic debut was not far away. When the conductor, Jullien, took the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for the English opera season on 1847-8, he hired a number of artists with little or no stage experience. And thus, he hired not only Willoughby Weiss, already a reference as a bass singer in English opera, but his even younger wife.

The season opened with Lucia di Lammermoor with the as yet unrisen Sims Reeves as its star. Weiss, who had weeks earlier been singing Henry Ashton in the opera with the Donald Kings in the provinces, settled this time for the part of Raymond, while the newest English bass, Henry Whitworth, played Ashton. Then, on 20 December, came the production which was to have been the key of the season: Balfe’s new opera The Maid of Honour with a cast of whom the young bass, in the role of Sir Tristram, was probably the most experienced on the operatic stage. Georgina was cast, behind Charlotte Ann Birch and Miss Miran, as Queen Elizabeth I. She was apparently ‘painfully nervous’, but the press review of her performance was nevertheless favourable, crediting her with ‘A soprano voice of delicious quality and extensive range […] utmost firmess and the most irreproachable intonation’ up to B natural. Strictures on Willoughby’s singing had now vanished for good. ‘For Mr Weiss we have only one word to say, his singing throughout his part was perfect’. Unfortunately, The Maid of Honour did not prove a draw, and after The Marriage of Figaro, in which Willoughby was cast as Almaviva to Whitworth’s Figaro, some more Lucias in which Weiss now sang Ashton, and a series of concerts and Benefits, the season folded in financial disarray.

Georgina, who had appeared only in the feature opera, had already returned to the concert stage and, along with Reeves and Henry Phillips as bass, had been heard at Exeter Hall in a performance of Judas Maccabaeus. On 2 March, she returned there to sing Galatea in Acis and Galatea. Reeves was her Acis, and Willloughby took the role of Polyphemus.

 

They were soon, however, back on the operatic stage. In April, Weiss returned to the Princess’s to take the small part of the Bailie in Anna Thillon’s vehicle The Nightingale, and when this was followed by a revival of The Crown Diamonds, Georgina joined the company to play Diana, alongside her husband’s Rebolledo. At the end of the season, he went north to sing in opera with Rebecca Isaacs, and then they both headed for the south coast to give concerts with Marietta Alboni. But once the operatic season at the Princess’s reopened, they returned to London and, on 16 October 1848, opened in an English version of Leoline. 

Halkett Rafter made her debut in the show’s title-role, and the Weisses supported as Frantz and as Lady Rosenthal. The rest of the season included repeats of Lucia and Norma, and Willoughby took up a series of new roles as ‘a benevolent old gentleman of the days of Charles II’ in Robin Goodfellow, alongside his wife as Lady Alice, Old George in Herold’s Marie, Domenico in George Linley’s Francesca Doria, Ratcliffe in Captain Rafter’s operatic version of The Heart of Midlothian (‘Afloat on the ocean’), Roberto in the Auber pasticcio The Blind Sister and Enrico in The Deserter.

In the close season, the two Weisses went down to the Surrey Theatre where E J Loder mounted a production of Les Huguenots. Weiss gave an impeccable Marcel, but Georgina’s Marguerite de Valois seems to have been less liked (‘the character requires a more accomplished vocalist’). The season also included La Favorita (Balthazar) et al. The two returned in October to the Princess’s, where the young Louisa Pyne had arrived to support prima donna Dolores Nau. They played Zerlina and Anna in Don Giovanni, with Georgina being cast as Donna Elvira and her husband as Leporello, to the tenor Don of William Harrison. Harrison also starred when Macfarren’s Charles II was mounted. Louisa was the jeune premiere, leaving the part of the Queen to Georgina whilst Weiss was cast as Captain Copp. ‘Madame Weiss’, it was noticeable, was regularly cast in royal or regal roles, and a contemporary writer refers to her as ‘a high-toned lady’, but in December, Schira’s opera Mina was produced, with Louisa Pyne as its juvenile again, and Mme Weiss was cast as Jenny, the maid. Willoughby played Lurio, an innkeeper. 

When The Night Dancers was revived for Mlle Nau, Georgina played Mary, when Le Val d’Andorre was produced, both she and Willoughby (Jacques Sincère) were in the cast, and he also took part in the productions of Gustavus III (Anakström) and Schira’s The Orphan of Geneva (Carwin). At Easter, when The Beggar’s Opera was put up with Louisa Pyne and Harrison in the leads, Georgina played Lucy Lockit. At the end of the Princess’s season, the whole company, the Weisses included, headed out of town with the theatre’s repertoire.

 

In 1851, Miss Pyne, Harrison and Willoughby Weiss were taken to the Haymarket Theatre to form the kernel of an English opera company at that respected house. The company appeared successfully in The Crown Diamonds, The Cadi, Son and Stranger, Queen for a Day, La Sonnambula, Charles the Second, The Beggar’s Opera, and the three stars were retained for another season in the first part of 1852. Weiss also took time out, among other concerts, to appear as Mentor on Edward Loder’s operatic masque The Island of Calypso  at the Philharmonic Concerts (14 April 1852) with Sims Reeves, Charlotte Dolby and Miss Lucombe.

Georgina, who kept up a regular run of concert performances, also stepped back into opera when she appeared in one act of Oberon at the Hullah concerts, and then, in the middle of the year, joined Emma Romer’s company at the Surrey Theatre. Amongst the roles she played there, she created the part of the heroine in Meyer Lutz’s little opera, The Charmed Harp.

 

Willoughby Weiss’s career had to date been very largely centred on the operatic stage, but he had also appeared in town and country in oratorio, and in September 1852 he was invited to take part in the Norwich Festival, sharing the bass music with Karl Formes and Belletti. Henceforth, the oratorio stage would become a much more important feature in his career. In the meanwhile, however, Mr and Mrs Weiss joined a travelling opera company which also featured Tom Travers, Mrs Alexander Newton and Fanny Huddart, for some performances in the provinces.

In 1853, again, they went to the country with opera companies led by Sims Reeves and his wife, with whom Willoughby also appeared in performances of Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera and La Sonnambula in town. In Fra Diavolo, Weiss took the comic role of Lord Allcash. However, in between these operatic engagements, they were seen frequently in concert, and now in oratorio. I spot him in January 1852 doing Walpurgisnacht with the Harmonic Union, and in 1853 the title-role in Elijah at Leeds. He also gave the cantata Kampf und Sieg with the New Philharmonic Society, and on June 20 the Weisses, husband and wife, joined Louisa Pyne, Charlotte Dolby, Charles Lockey and Alexander Reichardt at the Exeter Hall in a performance of The Messiah for the Choral Fund. Later in the year, Weiss sang the bass music in Samson and The Messiah with the Sacred Harmonic Society, and performed in Die erste Walpurgisnacht and Haydn’s ‘Te deum’ for the opening of St Martin’s Hall, whilst Georgina was heard in Dalston at the opening of the new local hall singing the soprano part in Judas Maccabaeus. The two of them joined together to give Elijah at Bradford at Christmas and, early in the new year, Elijah and Acis and Galatea at St Martin’s Hall, The Creation at Stonehouse, and so forth.

And all the time the concert engagements, separately and together, rolled in.

 

In 1854, the rumour was whispered on the other side of the Atlantic that Louisa Pyne, William Harrison and Weiss would visit America. But Weiss didn’t go, leaving his place in what was to be an enormously successful enterprise to Conrad Borrani. Instead, he just carried on with more of the same: Lake’s Daniel, a new Elijah (both of them) at St Martin’s Hall, Wyke’s Paradise Lost with the New Philharmonic Society, a season of opera at Drury Lane with the Reeveses (Don Giovanni, Pietro in Masaniello, Lord and Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo) and further performances at the Lyceum (Lucia di Lammermoor, Arnheim in The Bohemian Girl), the Orchestral Union concerts, the annual Three Choirs Festival on a truly royal bill of performers, and Judas Maccabaeus at St Martin’s Hall. In December, Mr Weiss went to Oxford with Charlotte Dolby and William Cummings to create F Gore Ousley’s The Martyrdom of St Polycarp (Polycarp). With time out to go to the country, supporting Jenny Lind, in concert.

In 1855, things went much the same. If Willoughby, as by now certainly Britain’s most successful home-grown bass singer, was more generally in evidence than his wife, Georgina continued to appear regularly and successfully on both stage and platform.  The Reeves connection held strong, and the Weisses appeared both in opera at the Haymarket and in Dublin (Fra Diavolo, The Bohemian Girl, Lucia di Lammermoor, Henry Smart’s Berta) with the famous tenor. On the oratorio front, Weiss was now a regular soloist both at St Martin’s Hall and Exeter Hall, he was a principal bass at the Birmingham Festival and, with Georgina, on the list of soloists for the Three Choirs Festival. At Christmas the spouses Weiss sang Elijah at Leicester. And on New Year’s Day 1856, Willoughby visited Windsor Castle for a command performance of Méhul’s Joseph with Clara Novello, George Benson, Sims Reeves, Lewis Thomas et al.

 

In 1856, the Weiss family devoted themselves more and more to oratorio and concerts and their only appearances in opera were at Sadler’s Wells, in the usual repertoire of the Reeveses. Amongst a run of oratorio performances in London and the provinces, they appeared with the Harmonic Union in S S Greathead’s Enoch’s Prophecy, Georgina sang second soprano to Jenny Lind in the first English performance of Paradise and the Peri, and both of them visited Birmingham with Reeves, Miss Novello, Miss Dolby and Lewis Thomas for a double performance of Elijah and The Messiah, for the opening of the new Music Hall. Weiss also took part in the Three Choirs Festival and the disastrous York Festival, and both sang in the Bradford Festival. He created the role of the Sheriff in Hatton’s cantata Robin Hood with Annie Milner, but Georgina didn’t appeal to the local critic ‘we can always listen to [her] with pleasure if we do not see her’. Apparently Mrs Weiss was extremely mannered. In the last part of the year, the two of them joined with the Reeveses, Marian Enderssohn and Allan Irving in a concert party.

 

In the early part of 1857, oratorio engagements, either for him or for them both, followed one after another, amongst which Willoughby was bass soloist for Henry Forbes’s Ruth at the Hanover Square Rooms. In August he repeated the role of the Druid in Walpurgisnacht with the Vocal Association, while on the same programme, Georgina gave the Mendelssohn finale, Loreley, made famous by Catherine Hayes. In August, both of them were amongst the soloists for he Three Choirs Festival (where they both sang in Robin Hood) and the next month the Norwich Festival.

In September, however, Willoughby Weiss returned to the operatic stage. Louisa Pyne and William Harrison had returned triumphant from their visit to America, and were launching themselves, at the Lyceum, on a London season. Weiss resumed his place at their side, although, when they opened on 21 September, with The Crown Diamonds he was not this time in the cast. The next opera was Les Huguenots with Anna Caradori and Augustus Braham in the leading roles, and Weiss was the Marcel of the occasion (‘marked by appropriate ruggedness, while he sang throughout with excellent discretion’). Hamilton Braham sang Oroveso when Norma was given, Weiss played Don Jose in Maritana, and when the season’s star item, Rose of Castille, was produced he introduced the role of Don Pedro ‘with excellent voice’.

 

At the end of the Lyceum season, the company went on the road, but Weiss surrendered his roles to the young Ferdinand Glover and stayed home. However, when they returned, on 21 January 1858, for one performance of The Rose of Castille, as a celebration of the wedding of the Princess Royal, Weiss took up his original role for the occasion. He also appeared at the State Concert given to commemorate the same occasion, taking part in the Beethoven Choral Fantasia and in Costa’s serenata The Dream alongside Clara Novello, Annie Lascelles and Sims Reeves.

At the same time, he returned to the theatre for a celebratory Macbeth. For the occasion, he sang the part of Hecate with Georgina as one of the singing witches. The rest of the year was devoted to concert performances at all the main venues, including the Birmingham Festival, where Weiss joined Reeves and the Misses Novello and Dolby to create Sterndale Bennett’s The May Queen, the Leeds Festival (both of them), the Crystal Palace concerts (both), the Surrey Gardens concerts (both) as well as Anna Bishop’s big homecoming concert (both). Weiss gave the first London May Queen at St Martin’s Hall (December 15), Georgina performed Judas Maccabaeus at Bristol with Reeves and Santley and the two of them went concertising with Reeves and Annie Lascelles, before, on 27 December, Weiss rejoined the Pyne and Harrison combination for the creation of Balfe’s newest opera Satanella at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.

Weiss was given a meaty part, alongside Miss Payne and Harrison, as the fiend Arimanes: ‘[his] fine bass voice is not inaptly employed in discoursing the wit and ungodly words of the Prince of Darkness’. Performances of the earlier successes topped up the grand success of Satanella through till the end of March, when the company again headed for the provinces, again without Mr Weiss.

For the next three years, the Weisses abandoned the stage for the platform, and accumulated vast lists of oratorio and concert engagements. If Georgina was now accepted by the biggest societies as a second soprano – to such as Clara Novello or Catherine Hayes – Willoughby shared the top of the heap with such performers as Charles Santley and Belletti. In consequence, there was a flare-up when the committee of the Three Choirs Festival scheduled him to sing second bass to Belletti in Elijah, long one of his acknowledged roles, and the Weisses withdrew from the Festival. All was calmed over the following year, when Weiss returned to his habitual place.

In January 1860, he took part in the performance at Glasgow of Horsley’s Gideon, in March he and Georgina starred in Son and Stranger at the Crystal Palace, in September they returned to Worcester and then to Norwich for the Festivals. At Norwich was given the first performance of Benedict’s cantata Undine, in which Weiss created the role of Kuhleborn. Over the following months he supported Clara Novello in what were advertised as her Farewell Performances.

 

In the last part of 1860, he appeared in the Monday pops, sang Elijah in Manchester, and found himself at the centre of a squabble when both the main Leeds musical societies claimed to have booked him for their Christmas Messiahs. On 1 February 1861 he sang the role of John Knox in Henry Leslie’s new cantata Holyrood, in September both of them took part in the Three Choirs Festival and in November, Willoughby sang the role of Caspar when Charles Halle staged a concert performance of Der Freischütz at his Manchester concerts. When a certain Madame Nita Norrie sponsored a concert party, Mr and Mrs Weiss went out for a round of northern dates, before getting into their annual routine of Christmas oratorios. In 1862, Weiss sang with Jenny Lind in a series of oratorios and at the Crystal Palace Handel Festival, before in June he at last returned to the theatre and to the Pyne and Harrison company.

 

The 1862 season of the now well-established company did not produce a new piece to match those which Weiss had created in his earlier seasons with the company. He played his original role in The Rose of Castille, Don Jose in Maritana, the part of Colonel Wolf, originally taken in The Puritan’s Daughter by Henri Corri, and the press reacted: ‘We were glad, and so seemed the public, to welcome back again to the arena he should never have been allowed to quit that excellent English bass, Mr Willoughby Weiss, whose noble voice and thorough musical proficiency render his services extremely valuable in a long list of operatic characters. Such an artist can ill be spared just now to the only theatre in which our national opera is represented.’ 

The roles of the Count de Camillac in Wallace’s Love’s Triumph, the Baron de Villefrance in The Armourer of Nantes, and, in the following season, of the Indian warrior Casgan in The Desert Flower and Gonzaques in Blanche de Nevers (‘The Old Vine Tree’) did not add to his reputation.

Amid the now normal run of non-theatrical engagements, however, the Weisses did again return to the theatre. In 1864, Weiss appeared in J B Buckstone’s concert at the Haymarket playing The Castle of Andalusia with members of the regular acting company. It clearly went well, for a couple of months later the manager put the old piece on his regular bills and hired Willoughby (Don Caesar) and Georgina (Donna Lorenza) to star.

Hot on the heels of this engagement, husband and wife were engaged for Covent Garden, where the successors of Pyne and Harrison were struggling to find success. Weiss was cast as Pietro in Masaniello and Rodolfo in La Sonnambula, and when Hatton’s opera Rose was produced, Georgina was given the role of Georgette with her husband as Jacques. Georgina also stood in for Parepa in the leading role of the season’s major production, Helvellyn.

When the opera season faded away, the Weisses returned to the concert world where Willoughby sang (29 Match 1865) in the first performance of Henry Smart’s The Bride of Dunkerron, until the two spouses were summoned to join the English opera company sponsored by E T Smith at Astley’s Theatre. They appeared as Gabriel and the Gipsy Girl in Guy Mannering, and he played Matt o’ the Mint and Dandini during the course of the engagement.

This would, in fact, be the couple’s last theatrical season. Weiss had had some health problems, and, hereafter, he preferred to stick to the concert platform. His presence there, however, if anything, increased over the next seasons. He was seen on all the principal platforms of the city and, if Georgina was more modestly displayed, she was still performing well.

During these seasons, the novelties on Weiss’s programme included John Cheshire’s cantata The King and the Maiden (as Allbrecht), C J Hargitt’s The Harvest Queen, Benedict’s The Legend of Saint Cecilia at the Sacred Harmonic Society, and Beethoven’s The Praise of Music. In October of 1867, he appeared at the Agricultural Hall in a performance of Judas Maccabaeus with Mme Enderssohn, Julia Elton and W H Cummings. His next engagement was to be at Edinburgh. But Willoughby Weiss did not make to to Scotland. He was taken ill, and as soon as 24 October, he died. Aged 47.

 

Georgina Weiss did carry on. She appeared intermittently in concert up until 1871. Then she remarried, one Charles Davis of New Malden, Surrey (m Finchley 13 February 1872), and disappeared from the musical world. She died some eight years later, aged just 54.

 

Willoughby Weiss’s place in the history of British music, and of English opera in particular, is one of importance – amongst basses – second, perhaps, only to Henry Phillips. But he has another claim, if not to fame, then to recognition.

Weiss, from an early age, was a prolific songwriter, and amongst his large output there was one song which, aided by his own rendition of it, became extremely popular: a setting of ‘The Village Blacksmith’. He also set to music Longfellow’s ‘The Slave’s Dream’, ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’, ‘The Fisherman’s Cottage’ and ‘The Day Is Done’, Sheridan’s ‘The Mid-Watch’ and Poe’s ‘It Was Many and Many a Year Ago’, plus several pieces with words by Frederick Enoch, including ‘When the Tide Rolls, ‘The Star That lights the Sailor Home’ and ‘The Old Sacristan’, His other titles included ‘The Miller’. ‘The Sentinel’, ‘King Canute’, ‘Will the Warrener’, ‘Kate of the Cannobie’, ‘We Were Boys Together’, ‘Let me be near thee’, ‘Robin the Archer’, ‘Fond Memories of Home’. Charles Coote composed a ‘Village Blacksmith Quadrille’ (pub: Weekes & Co) which included several of Weiss’s songs.

 

The Weisses’ daughter, Georgina Angelique Weiss (d Treemorne, Bushey Grove Rd, Watford 21 Feb 1920) married (10 June 1871) the tenor vocalist and music comedy player known as ‘Selwyn Graham’ (né Frederick Thomas Small).